Shri Mataji: "There should be no fear of death but on the contrary should be welcomed"

"What was most magical in my childhood was transformation. Death
itself was seen as a brief stopping point on an endless soul journey
that could turn a peasant into a king and vice versa. With the
possibility of infinite lifetimes extending forward and backward, a
soul could experience hundreds of heavens and hells. Death ended
nothing; it opened up limitless adventures.”- Deepak Chopra

Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

“In a human form you decrease your age as your birthday comes. But
with this you increase your age. And you are proud that you are
growing. In the human level you feel unhappy that you are growing;
here you feel proud that you are growing.”

The Messiah-Paraclete-Ruh-Devi
The Way Of Our Spiritual Growth And Sahaja Penance,
London, U.K. — April 22, 1984
"And when you die what happens to you is a very simple thing; that
you feel liberated, absolutely, and then you feel your freedom,
completely, and you can decide what to do. It's all under your own
guidance, your own desires, everything works out. You don't feel that
you have come out of your body and this is what (I) should tell you:
that there should be no fear of death but on the contrary should be
welcomed because you will feel much more liberated, much more at
ease.”

The Messiah-Paraclete-Ruh-Devi
To Achieve Complete Freedom, Cabella, Italy — May 7, 1995Death ended nothing; it opened up limitless adventures"Memoir: The Life Beyond

While writing this book on the afterlife, I kept being drawn back to
stories that I'd heard in India as a child. Parables are a powerful
way to teach children, and many of the ones told to me have lasted
all my life. So I decided to weave the book around tales of the kind
I heard at home, around the temples, and at school, hoping that the
reader would be enticed by a world where heroes battle darkness in
order to emerge into the light.

In this case the hero is a woman, Savitri, and the enemy she must
defeat is Yama, the lord of death. Yama shows up in her front yard
one day, waiting to take away her husband the moment he returns from
his work as a woodcutter. Savitri is terrified. What strategy could
possibly turn Death away from his inexorable mission?

I had no trouble imagining these characters. I was frightened for
Savitri and anxious to find out how her battle of wits with Death
turned out. Their world flowed easily into my own, because the India
of my childhood was not that far removed from ancient India. I want
to take a moment to convey what death and the world beyond meant back
then. It may seem like a very esoteric place. If so, you can come
back to it after reading the main body of the book. However
mysterious and exotic, here is where I began.

What was most magical in my childhood was transformation. Death
itself was seen as a brief stopping point on an endless soul journey
that could turn a peasant into a king and vice versa. With the
possibility of infinite lifetimes extending forward and backward, a
soul could experience hundreds of heavens and hells. Death ended
nothing; it opened up limitless adventures. But at a deeper level,
it's typically Indian not to crave permanence. A drop of water
becomes vapor, which is invisible, yet vapor materializes into
billowing clouds, and from clouds rain falls back to earth, forming
river torrents and eventually merging into the sea. Has the drop of
water died along the way? No, it undergoes a new expression at each
stage. Likewise, the idea that I have a fixed body locked in space
and time is a mirage. Any drop of water inside my body could have
been ocean, cloud, river, or spring the day before. I remind myself
of this fact when the bonds of daily life squeeze too tight.

In the West the hereafter has been viewed as a place akin to the
material world. Heaven, hell, and purgatory lie in some distant
region beyond the sky or under the earth. In the India of my
childhood the hereafter wasn't a place at all, but a state of
awareness.

The cosmos that you and I are experiencing right now, with trees,
plants, people, houses, cars, stars, and galaxies, is just
consciousness expressing itself at one particular frequency.
Elsewhere in spacetime, different planes exist simultaneously. If I
had asked my grandmother where heaven was, she would have pointed to
the house we lived in, not only because it was full of love, but
because it made sense to her that many worlds could comfortably
inhabit the same place. By analogy, if you are listening to a concert
orchestra, there are a hundred instruments playing, each occupying
the same place in space and time. You can listen to the symphony as a
whole or, if you wish, put your attention on a specific instrument.
You can even separate out the individual notes played by that
instrument. The presence of one frequency does not displace any of
the others.

I didn't know it as a child, but when I walked around the crowded
Delhi market where more humanity was packed into one bazaar than was
possible to imagine, the world I couldn't see was even more crowded.
The air that I breathed contained voices, car noises, bird songs,
radio waves, X-rays, cosmic rays, and an almost infinite array of
subatomic particles. Endless realities lay all around me.”

Deepak Chopra, Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
Harmony; 1 edition (October 17, 2006), pages 1-2
ISBN-10: 0307345785
ISBN-13: 978-0307345783
"General George Patton of World War II fame, no stranger to personal
reincarnational remembrances (he claimed to recall previous
battlefield experiences as Napoleon), once observed," For Hindus
death is the most exalted experience of life.”This idea is naturally
hard for non-Hindus to grasp — all the more so for atheists facing
Eternal Oblivion and those of Abrahamic faiths which define death as
a punishment for man's sinful disobedience. To them, death is the
ultimate sign of man's spiritual failure, a belief which arouses
instincts of denial and injustice. One may feel penitent and guilty,
not to mention uncertain about the destination ahead.

No such thoughts attend the dying days of a Hindu. Of course, there
is much sadness surrounding the passing of friends and family, but
that is honest acknowledgement of our loving attachments. Inside we
know death is OK, natural, that the soul, even if it was less than
perfect in this life, is continuing its appointed journey across
life's oceanic phenomena toward Liberation and will, in time and
without fail, reach the other shore. The Hindu's presumption of
numerous births mitigates the tragedy of death, whether the passage
is his own or another's. So, Hindus call death by lofty names — Maha
Samadhi,"Great Superconscious State"And Maha Prasthana,"Great
Departure.”To be near an awakened soul at the time he or she gives
up the body is considered among the most blessed of opportunities.
While ordinary people are remembered on their day of birth, Hindus
honor enlightened souls on the day of their departure, translated in
English as"liberation day.” "

Himalayan Academy, 1998. www.hinduismtoday.kauai.hi.us/welcome.html
"Those who have spiritual enlightenment tell us that the basic cause
of fear of death is our metaphysical or spiritual ignorance, which
lies in the identification of the spirit with the body. As long as we
are not aware of our true spiritual essence, of the reality of the
spirit or the true self within us, it is natural that we are
subjected to this fear of death.. The body is subject to the laws of
nature. It is born, it grows, it attains maturity, it declines and it
perishes. When we identify with this body and we have no
understanding of our spiritual essence, naturally we feel that
decline and eventual disintegration of the body mean our decline and
destruction. So in all religions, the great spiritual geniuses have
declared unequivocally that the more we know of our true spiritual
essence of our being, the more we overcome the fear of death. We take
a deeper perspective. We realize destruction of the body does not
involve destruction of our spiritual nature, which is immortal and
imperishable in character. Therefore, it is evident that the best way
to conquer and overcome this fear of death is to sharpen our
spiritual understanding and experience...

As the great philosopher Spinoza said, the essence of spiritual
wisdom is to be able to behold life under the aspect of eternity.”

Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri, The Essence of Spiritual Philosophy
Thorsons Publishing Group, UK, 1990, p. 133-6.
.”.. ato become the very self of every being' (BG. 5.7) does not mean
the loss of a personal relationship with God, and probably with other
liberated beings as well. This is in line with at least one type of
Upanishadic thought typified in the dialogue between Indra and
Prajapati in Chandogya Upanishad 8. The relevant passage is 8.12, 1-
3:

Bountiful One! For sure this body is mortal, held in the grip of
death. Yet it is the dwelling-place of the immortal, incorporeal
self. And this self, while still in the body, is held in the grip of
pleasure and pain; and so long as it remains in the body there is no
means of ridding it of pleasure and pain. But once it is freed from
the body, pleasure and pain cannot as so much touch it.

The wind has no body. Clouds, thunder, and lightning — these too have
no body. So, just as these arise from the broad expanse of space up
there and plunge into the highest light, revealing themselves each in
their own form, so too does this deep serenity arise out of this body
and plunge into the highest light, revealing itself in its own form.
Such a one is a superman (uttara purusa); and there he roves around,
laughing, playing, taking his pleasure with women, chariots, or
friends and remembering no more that excrescence which was his body...

Liberation is no longer the isolation of the classical Samkhya-Yoga:
rather it is the end of what Christians mystics call as via
purgativa, the way of the vishuddh'tma, the 'purified self' (5.7:
cf. 5.11:6.12.) It is the beginning of the personal encounter of the
integrated and liberated self with God.”

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